


This World Is Not Made For You

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: Wally & Mack (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mack's weird human issues, Pre-Slash, Psychic Abilities, References to Drugs, Wally's weird alien issues, because I'm a coward about writing human teenager/sentient ant colony, cordyceps, ennui, weird psychic ants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-28 23:51:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14460525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: The Emperor of Arion is dead.That sounds like a good thing on the surface; no more threats, no more assassins and intergalactic war. Wally is the new Emperor and Mack is finally free of freakiness to focus on his baseball and his drama club and his college applications.This is the worst thing that could have happened to them both.





	This World Is Not Made For You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LiveOakWithMoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/gifts).



> For June, my beloved shitcake, the best of collaborators, the dearest of friends. I'd say she is the Mack to my Wally but we are more like an Arionian hivemind. I don't know what I'd do without her, so I wrote some dumb aliens to celebrate the day of her spawning. 
> 
> NB [my last Wally & Mack fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590078) went with a slightly less out there take on Arionian anatomy, but I've done my best to do justice to June's headcanon here, and do a respectful take on where our boys end up post-season 2. (It's not apart, fuck you Jed Nord) (I've heard the ant thing's also Matt Rose's interpretation of Wally but I've never seen proof, can anyone confirm?) (I did NOT write Milas because even our friendship has its limits)

“Huh,” said Mack. “Somehow I thought it’d be harder than that.”

He winced, because that wasn’t really the kind of thing you said to your friend while standing over his father’s smouldering corpse, and then winced harder as it jarred his wounded neck.

“The hard part’s still to come,” Wally said softly, one hand coming to rest on the scorched and bloodied shoulder of Mack’s varsity jacket. Mack had got pretty good at reading the foreign language of Wally’s facial expressions, but this one was beyond him.

“Buddy, I just got stabbed in the neck by a giant wasp monster. I just _died_. And you- no more assassins and bounty hunters tracking you down, no more looking over your shoulder. You’re _free_ , Wally.”

“Emperor.” Wally didn’t say it snottily, like he got sometimes when Mack fucked up some weird point of Arionian etiquette. He sounded as young and stricken as he had that first day on the outfield. He dropped to his knees beside the charred, crumbling thing that had been the iron-fisted ruler of three galaxies, and pressed both hands into the ashes, drew them back cupping a handful of greasy, flaky cinders. “I’m emperor now.”

“Okay, cool. I don’t think it’s gonna stop Coach Mathers ordering you to clean the equipment store whenever he’s pissed,” Mack babbled, hoping to god that playing sandcastles your father’s ashes was somehow normal on Arionia and not a sign he was cracking up - he’d been upset to an extent that was kind of gratifying when he’d thought that Mack was dead. “But maybe it’ll get you out of the career fair.”

Wally shrugged. “It’s for the pheromones,” he said, like that explained anything.

Something rustled in the corridors outside the throne room, the patter of too many feet on the ship’s paper deck, and suddenly the Verspirain Broodguard were upon them. Their chitinous armour was black and gold, and venom gleamed, dark and oily, on the points of their blades. Mack suppressed a shudder at the sight. He wasn’t too keen on the idea of a second dose, but he hefted his baseball bat anyway and stepped in front of Wally, trying his damndest to look menacing to the nine-foot tall poisonous bug monsters with swords for butts.

“Stand down,” said Wally in a voice that was even stranger than the one he’d just used. Stranger but somehow familiar, and Mack’s mind recoiled from the comparison that had leapt unbidden to his mind.

The disquiet only grew stronger when the Broodguard listened, blades falling, antennae tilting alertly.

“Set a course to Sol system of the Laniakea Supercluster,” said Wally. Well, what Wally _said_ was something about flying the Bird Road, and what Mack assumed he meant was “take us back to Earth,” but Tiffany’s little translator earpiece, while ingenious, only translated into Tiffany.

“You heard the man,” Mack said, and decided he’d earned the right to strike a heroic pose, even if, now he was pretty sure the waspmonsters weren’t going to eat them, he was listing back into the console for support. “Take us home.”

“I’m not a man,” said Wally quietly, and that was so like him - freeze frame, laugh track - that Mack wouldn’t think about his expression until it was much too late.

* * *

Senior year was everything Mack had spent the past two years of freakishness hoping it would be. No one in the class was replaced by a pod person or an evil android duplicate - and Mack checked pretty thoroughly. There were no brainslug infections and gym class wasn’t cancelled because the teacher had been eaten by Cyraxids. No one flinched or leapt to their feet every time someone opened a classroom door too fast. Most of all, there was no guileless ginger alien beating him out for the starring role in _Newsies_ without knowing what a strike, Santa Fe, or a newspaper was.

Mack could _finally_ focus on learning his lines and playing baseball and sorting out his college applications.

He hated it.

“I hate it,” he said in homeroom, feet propped on the back of Silas’ chair. “How are we supposed to care about our SATs when we know there's like, an intergalactic war going on out there?”

“Well,” said Silas, tipping his hat down over his eyes so that the anime pins stuck to the band winked in the strip lights. “Now there’s not a runaway space prince going to school with us, I reckon it’s not gonna be our problem quite so much. You’ve seen how quiet it’s been. I actually got to go to the movies last weekend. The _movies_! If I never get mutated by a dilithium flux decapacitor ray again it'll be too soon.”

“That happened one time. And we still made it Trick or Treating afterwards.” If anything they'd got extra candy by dint of their amazingly realistic 'costumes’. “Don’t you guys miss him?”

“Sure,” said Tiffany. “Now I have to build an android to take me to Homecoming, and unless I work out the kinks it’s gonna be like dancing with a Speak and Spell. A really hot one but it’s gonna make the homecoming king and queen acceptance speeches super awk.”

“I could take you,” said Silas. “You know, if you wanted.”

“Thanks, Si, but a Furby isn't much of an upgrade.”

“ _Ouch_ ,” Mack said, but his heart wasn't really in it. He was thinking about what Wally would do with a Furby - try to debate philosophy, or dissect it to ‘get a better understanding of your primitive Earth electronics’ and then electrocute himself.

Mack could almost imagine the look of bemusement, the smell of burning hair, and then Wally would say something about them not being a patch on Frongs, and drag Mack off on some harebrained scheme to procure a self-replicating bio-organic entertainment unit.

“Hey,” said Tiffany. “Earth to Mack! You still with us?”

He was smiling, Mack realised with a jolt. A dreamy, sappy smile, and he wiped it off his face and put his feet down to grab his trig books. “Yeah, I’m still here.”

 _Unfortunately_.

* * *

It should have been freeing.

W- _nyl'hor_ had spent two years hiding behind a fake name and a fake body, lying to his friends about who ( _what_ ) he was. Trying to keep himself from going to pieces which, given he was an insect hivemind piled into the rough approximation of a human, was a rather literal problem. Not broadcasting how new and exciting and terrifying everything was to the world, and finding the line between absorbing enough from other people so that he wouldn’t flounder too badly without upsetting them by knowing a thought they hadn’t articulated with their mouths.

It had been _exhausting_.

Dropping the illusion, relaxing the tight control of his constituent workers and letting them wander through the familiar paper passages of the hiveship where he’d been hatched and brooded should have been a welcome relief.

It wasn’t, though. He kept coming back to- well, the ‘he’.

Because nyl’hor _wasn’t_ a he - the greater part of him were female neuter insofar as Arionians mapped to earth genders. But presenting as male had been the optimum survival strategy on Earth and so that’s what he’d done, and somewhere along the line he’d gone all singular.  

Someone was coming - he could feel the vibrations in a hundred thousand pairs of antennae - and nyl’hor stretched out so he didn’t look too bipedal, sending clumps of himself scuttling up the throne room walls.

His father’s senchal stopped a respectful distance away, sending scouts forward with a waft of apologetic pheromones. Nyl’hor allowed them to mingle with himself in greeting, though it was all he could do not to recoil from the intrusion.

 _Your realm lies in ruins, Prince_ , they told him. _What your parent did not squander on their ill-advised pursuit of you will tear itself apart in the vacuum of their absence._

“I know,” said nyl’hor. _We know,_  he said again, in proper mindspeak, when they looked askance.

 _You must act. We will support you_ . They meant everyone upon the hiveship, which was a significant number of soldiers, but not at all significant against the entirety of the forces rallying against them. Wally wasn’t much of a tactician but he knew being outnumbered several million billion to one wasn’t great odds. _But you must be swift. Decisive. You must lead._

 _I was thinking_ , Wally told it, thinking to the tomes of Earth history he’d consumed so avidly. There was a quaint, storybook feel to the way it was told back, like a story. So far from the vivid rush of knowledge and emotion that was the Hive’s stored memory. He remembered one book in particular, the story of a human man who’d wept when there was nothing left to conquer and then left no fit air behind- _Everything fragmented so quickly, the moment m- our parent’s attention shifted. If all the galaxy was only waiting for a chance to revolt, wouldn’t it be better if_ -

But the senchal was broadcasting horrified confusion, their drones’ antennae flailing. Wally didn’t have many allies, fewer still that cared about his personal wellbeing, and he wouldn’t get far by alienating them. _We’ll think on what to do_ , he told them, careful of his pronouns.

 _You know what the council will suggest. What your parent would have done_ , said the senchal carefully.

 _No_ , Wally told it, so furious, so sickened that some parts of him lashed out, snapping at the senchal, scattering its scouts, snapping the slowest of them apart with furious snaps of his many jaws. _We will_ never _use it. Do not suggest that to us again._

The senchal drew their scouts back, broadcasting wounded dignity. They were not, Wally realised dully, even surprised at the outburst.

It was, after all, just what his father would have done.

* * *

Coming up with reasons for his disappearances had been one of Mack’s least favourite parts of the whole alien-fighting gig. He _hated_ lying to his mom and if homework, baseball practice and rehearsals could account for all the times he stayed out late after school, it didn’t explain sneaking out of his window in the middle of the night with a baseball bat to go hunt mutated quarterbacks through the stadium.

He couldn’t have hated it _that_ much though, given there was no fanged Chip Hudson to corral but here he was doing it anyway. He knew which joists creaked and where to hold on the drainpipe as he shimmied down it, and grabbed his baseball bat from where he’d dropped it to the lawn. The sneaking wasn’t  _necessary_ \- his ma worked long hours at the observatory - but it didn’t feel right letting himself out the front door. There wasn’t much thrill in that.

There also wasn’t much thrill in a Pennsylvania farming town, even at two in the morning. He’d tried breaking into the secret, evil government research lab the week before, but it was empty and must have been since Wally left, and while there were still some mothmen in the woods, none of them seemed interested in his flashlight. The crashed ship at the bottom of the quarry was quietly rusting, abandoned but for a couple of racoons, and the methyl-hydrate dealers had all shut down.

There were the guys that cooked actual meth, in a trailer up at Bluepond Point, but bothering them seemed way too dangerous. _Real_ dangerous, not the terrifying-but-Wally-had-his-back-so-how-bad-could-it-be danger he was used to. But Wally was off ruling an intergalactic empire, and Mack was stuck here, and Wally hadn’t even asked if Mack had wanted to come too. He would’ve said no because his friends and family and his baseball scholarship and were on Earth. But it would’ve been nice if he’d hesitated.

And maybe Mack had almost died a couple of times during their adventures, and actually died once, but people died on Earth all the time too! And more would maybe die if there were still Targazian fleshborers out in the woods. And if there were still mothmen breeding out there- well mothmen weren’t going to kill anyone, but there could be some pretty nasty wardrobe malfunctions.

So resolved, Mack dropped down soundlessly onto the lawn, hefted his bat up onto his shoulder and set off for the edge of town.

* * *

In the two years he’d spent in exile, Wally had missed any number of things, from his favourite foods - cantaloupe juice really wasn’t a substitute for hemipteran honeydew - to the depth of connection - the subsummation of the self - one could experience with other Arionians, that humans simply weren’t equipped for.

But it turned out, looking at the writhing, heaving swarm of his generals and councillors piled in the centre of the meeting chamber with something uncomfortably close to distaste, that he’d kind of liked the whole individuality thing. The black and red carapaces gleamed in the dim phosphorescence of the fungus high in the chamber ceiling, as all came together into one. He could not pick out where any one of them ended or began but that, of course, was the point. How else could true understanding be achieved?

 _You know what they will demand_ , said the senchal as they approached, columns of scouts dripping out to merge with them, the air already sharp with pheromones. _And they are not wrong. Do not be stubborn, Emperor. For the sake of all of us-_

 _Enough_ , Wally told them and, with another surge of disgust, dropped out of the tight cluster he had held himself in, form collapsing as the swarm drew him in.

It was like - and here he had to resort to entirely inadequate metaphors - like falling into a lake, the water rushing into you, only you were water too and you were coming apart in it, diluting what was you as a million billion pieces of mind warred for consensus.

The fear was overwhelming, so thick in the air even Mack, with one inadequate body and no pheromone receptors, could have tasted it. There was anger too, bright and searing, more focused than the fear, and Wally lost some thousand drones to it, snapped apart by the jaws of frenzied soldiers. Anger at the outer systems for their revolt, anger at the last emperor for their failure, and, heavy as a cudgel, fury at Wally himself, for jeopardising everything. Just as losing some drones was nothing to any single Arionian, losing one prince should have meant nothing.

Wally did not apologize, because he was them now, as they were him, and one did not apologize to oneself. One sought a solution.

 _Concessions,_ some councillor gave up to the swarm, and it echoed, drone to drone. But they were also his father’s generals and they were not of a mind to concede anything.

 _Diplomacy, make us see sense, our cause is right, we have brought prosperity, we will explain it, we will see_.

It was a struggle to ride the surging, warring tides of others’ thoughts, because they were  _his_ thoughts now, a part of him as he was part of them, a single mind, a single organism with a hundred, thousand years of experience. He was losing pieces of himself to them just as he gained them - memories of a swirling green star system that he had never seen, the chalky, tart taste of an unripe fruit that no part of him had never eaten, the empty, flailing hurt of a colony robbed of its pupa-

It was like swimming against the tide, not letting himself be swept along by the surge of consensus, pulling back enough to form a thought of his own. But that was what an Emperor was  _for_ and Wally had spent a long time thinking (a long time asking himself what Mack would think was right) and now he pulled the scattered pieces of himself together and suggested  _let them go_.

 **_ No_**, the thought came back, from all of them.

Well. The scuttling undercurrents of disagreement were gone. He’d united them in disagreeing with him, if nothing else.

 _They are not us_ , Wally told them, sending himself racing desperately through the swarm, brushing antennae, searching for the faintest scent of agreement. _We will destroy ourselves in keeping them, destroy them, destroy all we’ve built._

_**We will not be us if we are parted.** _

_We will be better._

**_Are_ you ** _**better? You have been sundered long. You are not us. You hold back.**  _

An Arionian who was not- was not stunted would not have recoiled from that. But Wally did, and they felt it.

 _There is one thing_ \- and this was a new thought, introduced by one of his father’s generals. They spelt it out in the scent and the shift of bodies, and Wally, who wasn’t them but almost was and felt the decision as his, the crime as his. High places. Staggering drones with hyphae-threaded carapaces. Colonies clumped together into one great dying mass. Great, towering fungi sprouting and sporing from the husks of the dead of a thousand worlds. _One weapon that will stop this._

Scattered agreement, growing louder as the image spread.

It had been his father’s pet project. The fungus was harmless to any number of species, a macabre curiosity, but to Arionians- and it _was_ Arionians that were revolting now, even on the innermost worlds of the Empire. The Empire had been untended too long, and colonies had become _they_ rather than _we_.

It weaponised every drone infected, spreading spores, broadcasting their awful summons for more to join them in the spreading web. Infect a single space station and the sheer horror of it would spread, even faster than the fungus. It would be enough. A few million dead for the good of the greater being that was the Arionian Empire. Didn’t they understand that?

Sometimes you had to make sacrifices.

But what would Mack say?

 _No_ , Wally told them. _No_.

** _We must use it. We must, we must, there is no other way to save us, this is best._ **

_No-_

** _Yes. Use it. Do it._ **

**_No_** _,_ Wally snarled and, before they could drag him deep into the roaring surge of agreement, the place where ‘they’ became ‘we’ again and a plan to destroy a billion sentient lifeforms became his own, he drew back from the swarm. His drones staggered drunkenly, clutching eggs and larvae, all the pieces of him, as he came back to himself.

On a hundred thousand trembling limbs, his wings drooping and scraping at the paper deck plates, Wally staggered from the chamber. There was a buzzing behind him, and the air was acrid with their fury, but no part of him looked back as he fled. Again.

There could be no consensus without the Emperor. And without that, there would be no sporeplague.

But the thing was - and who knew better than Wally? - Emperors could be replaced. 

* * *

 Silas noticed the scratches on his cheeks and wordlessly handed him the foundation, but Mack left it off because some grazes weren’t out of character for Jack ‘Cowboy’ Kelly.

Tiffany brushed silvery scales out of his hair and asked him if he wanted to help her study for the history test next week.

“Heck yeah,” Mack said, and didn’t tell them about the crunch of chitin or the bat he’d left broken in a monster’s brain, or how right it felt to be a _hero_ again.

He laughed and joked with Silas, running lines with him at the diner after club, and hanging out playing video games, and even if Silas was way more into _Halo_ and _XCOM_ than Mack thought was tactful, it still felt _good_. Natural. Silas wasn’t taking snide jabs at the gawky new kid Mack had adopted and Wally wasn’t asking seemingly guileless but suspiciously pointed questions about Silas’ fedora and cranial deformities.

Without Wally, he and Tiff wouldn’t even have been friends, never mind what they were to each other now. She cheered for him in every baseball game, and he cheered her cheering at every football game, and they’d take each other out for milkshakes afterwards, at the Lunchpad Grill, like they’d used to do back when they had real adventures. They didn’t talk about much, but it was a companionable kind of not talking. He was pretty sure she wanted the same thing he did - someone else who  _remembered_ , who wasn’t trying to put all the freakiness behind them as fast as possible like the rest of the town. Someone who’d _iked_ the strangeness, someone who felt a protuberance shaped hole in their life too.

More than once, he almost asked her to come to the woods with him, but he didn’t. He asked her to Homecoming instead, and she said yes. “Silas can have the robot,” she added seriously, blinking eyes the tempting blue of a tropical lagoon.

* * *

There were tunnels in the hiveship that he hadn’t used since he was grubs. He piled into them now, burrowing through the fault lines of processed paper, until he found a pocket large enough that he could coalesce again. He didn’t bother with projections, but he piled himself into something approximating a humanoid, because there was something _wrong_ with him - that he was a him, first and foremost - and he found it comforting.   

He tried to think what Mack would say, what Mack would _do_ but Mack was a thousand lightyears away. And Mack didn’t understand Arionia. Mack thought _people_ mattered, every last disposable one of them, and when Wally was with him, he almost agreed. Mack was always so blindingly, blazingly certain, so _good_. Wally was never sure of anything but his own cowardice.

The senchal found him sooner than he would have liked - but of course, they remembered

 _The fungus will work_ , they said gently.

_Efficacy is not what worries us. You have known us since we were pupa. You know I can’t allow this._

_Yes, we know what you can’t do. But can you stop it? You lack your parent’s drive. Their vision. Their hunger._

_If you killed us now-_ It was all pheromones. Traditionally, if power was to be transitioned, the Emperor would give up some portion of himself to join the chosen colony, giving them a share of their knowledge, their authority, their scent. Wally had made do with a handful of charred corpses and the senchal might do the same.

 _Only a fool seeks to be Emperor. And at a time like this, killing you will only speed the decay._ Several of them came forward, to groom his drones as they had not done since he was a juvenile, only a few hundred bodies.

 _How long did you serve our parent?_ Wally asked, legs scraping nervously against the floor (some of his legs. The greater part of him was scavenging, sleeping, caring for his brood, and it seemed very unfair that, as far as he could gather, humans did all that automatically).

 _Years uncounted_ said the senchal. If Wally were what he was supposed to be, he wouldn’t have to guess at the emotion behind those words; they’d know.

_They conquered worlds while you- you farmed and raised our broods and kept the nest well guarded._

_Yes._

Wally was Emperor. Theoretically. As long as he could hold it. And maybe someone stronger could change the whole hiveship, change the hive rather than being changed.

That wasn’t who Wally was. Wally didn’t sway hearts and minds like Mack who was, in some ways, a better Arionian than Wally would ever be.

 _Prepare a shuttle for me_ , he said.

_Are you fleeing again?_

Most of the Senchal drew back. Disgust was obvious. And weariness. And fear. But this was good, this was right, and Wally, needed them to understand _. Yes. Go to the shuttle bay. I’ll meet you there._

No part of him wanted to do this but sacrifice was necessary, he got that, he’d seen Mack try to sacrifice his life, and he only had the one. All the walls he had been maintaining, the separation he had been keeping, he let fall, let the Senchal know him completely, _be_ him completely.

It was terrifying. A violation, a loss, but it was wonderful too. They were greater now, more than they had ever let themself be before.

 _We understand_ , they said.

Just for a moment, it was what Wally had been missing. The feeling they were part of something greater than themselves.

And then it was gone and a part of him was the senchal who was Wally who was the senchal, hurrying towards the shuttle bay, and part of him was Wally, just Wally, flying as fast has his wings would carry him, towards the biolabs, where there was something he still needed to do.

* * *

Mack could maybe have been more careful.

Or, rather, he _had_ been careful to douse himself in Axe body spray to keep the mothmen from scenting him, and had carefully followed the trail of silvery lepidopteran scales towards their nesting cave, but he could maybe have paid more attention to where that cave _was_ i.e. Bluepond Point, and he should probably have been more careful of where he shone his torch i.e. not right at the trailer with the suspicious reek of cat piss.

Baseball bats might be enough for the exoskeletons of a monster not adapted to Earth’s gravity, but they weren’t much good against a meth dealer with an assault rifle, and his recordings of bat sonar _probably_ weren’t going to terrify them into submission.

Might be worth a shot though; his other plan didn’t seem to be working out so hot.

“I’m totally serious, guys. I really want to buy some meth.”

“Prove it,” said one of the meth guys. They were both wearing ratty white t-shirts and jeans, but this one was wearing a red cap as opposed to a blue one.

“Uh. You...uh...wanna give me some meth? To do?” Mack was really glad the Juilliard scholarship board weren’t here to witness the performance. It wasn’t his finest.

“Fuck off,” said Red Hat. “We’re not giving you free meth.”

“RIght. So, uh, We’re back to me buying it. I have-” Mack scrabbled through his pockets. “- Forty-seven bucks, two nickels and a Dunkin Donuts gift card. Which is cool, I don’t want _much_ meth, you know? Just a sample- And upon consideration, maybe I don’t even want that. Maybe I’ll just. Leave.”

“Maybe you won’t go anywhere, you freaky little shit,” said Blue Hat. In addition to the blue hat, he also had the gun, held loosely at his side, and some seriously dodgy trigger discipline. “Maybe we’ll bury you in the woods.”

“That doesn’t seem like a sound business strategy.”

“How’d you hear about this place?” said Red Hat who seemed the more reasonable of the two - Mack really wished he was the one with the gun.

“Literally everyone in town knows, dude. So it totally won’t matter if I tell anyone, cause even Pops down at the general store knows you’re up here. So I’m just gonna leave-”

“Yeah, no. You’re not,” said Blue Hat.

“I think he is,” said a calm, musical voice that made Mack’s already pounding heart beat faster. “Otherwise I travelled seventy-five hundred light years for nothing.”

“Wally! Dude, I could kiss you!”

Wally's face did something very complicated. And then the rest of him did something very complicated too.

There was that whole Arionian psychic connection hypnovoice thing Wally could do (usually only when it was inconvenient), but he didn’t try getting all shiny and soulful now. What he did was explode into a swarming ball of a million red anty, spidery looking things. Gone was the lanky redheaded teenager with a serene expression, all that was left was a swirling vortex of wings and claws and gnashing mandibles, a biblical plague in Converses high tops. _My biblical plague,_  Mack thought smugly, which was a hell of a weird thing to think, and a hell of a weird thing to be _smug_ about, but it had been that kind of day. He dropped low, crawling behind a pile of rusted paint cans, which turned out to be a smart idea, when the meth guy with the assault rifle raised it and squeezed the trigger.

Mack flinched, hands covering his ears, but the guy had been aiming at Wally and firing bullets at an angry Arionian was about as smart and as effective as flicking pebbles at a hornet’s nest.

The rifle dry-clicked and Wally descended upon them both. He didn’t do anything dramatic like lay eggs in their brains (“That’s not how our life cycle works,” Wally confided later) or even bite them very much (“My mandibles aren’t designed for that.”) There was mostly just a lot of embarrassing screaming and flailing, and then both guys went sprinting off into the woods.

Mack looked away politely as Wally reformed, remembered how many fingers humans were supposed to have, and reformed _again_.

“So,” he said. Suddenly awkward. “What brought you back?”

“I didn’t like being Emperor. People kept trying to commit genocide.” Wally’s face as unexpressive as it had been back in the beginning, when he’d still been learning what human facial expressions were. Hopefully, he’d get back into the swing of things, because the blank stare was downright creepy. “Also I missed you.”

“That’s...wow, that’s really sweet. I missed you too, bro. But- don’t you have to uh, do Emperor things? Prevent all that genocide?”

“Part of me is. Sort of. _This_ part of me stole an experimental biological weapon, plus all the blueprints, and now I’m hiding on Earth.” Wally reached into- Mack was going to hope there was a pocket and he hadn’t just stuck his hand in his own torso - and held up a slim capsule of something oily looking and unpleasant. “Assuming you don’t mind? I imagine I’ll do everything I can to keep things under control, but I’m not very good at politics, and there are definitely going to be more bounty hunters. Possibly an invasion. If you’d prefer-”

“Don’t you _dare_ leave us again buddy.” It was probably kind of fucked up that Mack’s first reaction was a thrill of excitement. _Bring it on_. That his other thought was about Wally’s eyes, and how they compared to Tiffany’s, he’d unpick later. Homecoming was already shaping up to be _awkward_. “Do you have any idea how bored we were?”

“Yes. Bored enough to buy methamphetamines. I sang a whole song about why you shouldn’t do drugs, Mack-”

“Ah, shaddap and come here, you dweeb.” It didn’t _quite_ make sense to give noogies to an extraterrestrial who _probably_ didn’t actually have a head, but putting Wally in a headlock was still the most satisfying thing Mack had done in weeks. 

Standing next to a stinking, rusted trailer, on the eve of  _another_ intergalactic war was where they both belonged. 


End file.
